


Missing Piece

by kateorangesky11



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Gravity Falls AU, only child au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateorangesky11/pseuds/kateorangesky11
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little ditty I did for the Only Child AU. I don't know if I'll write more of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Piece

“Ugh. Why do I have to do everything?”

Mabel hammered another nail in yet another tree, and hung the sign haphazardly from it. _This way to the Mystery Shack!_ it said in bright red letters. She grumbled as she picked up the stack of wooden signs, moving to another tree only feet away.

“Soos even offered! And yet I’m the one out here in this creepy forest,” she muttered to the universe. “It’s not fair.”

_Don’t complain. I actually think this is kind of cool._

Mabel looked up at the sky. Polaris was just starting to shine.

She smiled. _Yeah, you would_ , she thought.

She placed the next nail, but when the hammer fell the tree gave off a hollow metallic sound, like a large bell ringing.

“What the—“ she started, and hit the tree again. It made the same noise, and there seemed to be a collection of dust on the trunk. She brushed it away, feeling the slightest hairline crack in the metal.

_Open it! Open it!_

She pulled back the sheet of metal, revealing that the tree was in fact hollow, but that wasn’t all. There was some sort of device inside, covered in dust and cobwebs. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. _What is this, Star Trek?_ she thought to herself. She pressed a button on the machine, but it wouldn’t give. She was fiddling with the switches when suddenly she heard something moving behind her. She whirled around, where there was a square hole in the ground that hadn’t been there before. She slowly approached it, ready to run at the slightest sign of trouble. But as she looked inside, all she saw was an extremely dusty book.

_Cool cool cool cool! Pick it up!_

Her fingers slid a little against the dust as she picked up the book. She swiped off the front, revealing a six-fingered golden hand with a painted number three.

_What’s inside?_

“Would you give me a minute?” she said, sitting down. She opened the cover.

“’Property of…’” she muttered, but the page was too torn to see who the book actually belonged to. She turned to the next page.

“June 18th,” she read, “It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I began researching the strange and wondrous secrets of Gravity Falls, Oregon.” She flipped through the journal, finding pages upon pages of drawings, charts, and notes.

Normally she wouldn’t be interested in this sort of thing, but she knew he would. She held her wrist, running her thumb over the place where, every day, she drew the mark. When she was old enough she’d get a tattoo, but for now this would have to do. She felt a gut instinct to keep this book, so she took it and ran back to the Shack.

The sun was fully beyond the horizon before she reached the front door of the Shack. She turned the doorknob and found her Grunkle Stan sitting in the armchair, watching TV.

“Hey, sweetie! I was just about to send a hunting party to get you,” he said, not looking away from the screen. “What took you so long?”

Mabel opened her mouth, but something stopped her.

“It just took longer than I expected to get all the signs up,” she replied, which was not technically a lie. She hadn’t expected for a mysterious trapdoor to take up her time. She took the steps two at a time and entered the attic. Two twin beds sat on opposite ends of the room. Mabel took the right one, as she always did. She left the other side untouched.

“I’ll deal with you later,” she said to the journal, putting it under her pillow. She pulled on her pajamas took her hair out of its usual braid.

“Goodnight, Grunkle Stan!” she yelled downstairs.

“Goodnight, kid!” he yelled back up to her. She smiled and closed the door, crossing over to the other bed to fluff the pillow before crawling into her own bed to go to sleep.

 

Mabel woke in a cold sweat. Her heart was beating in her chest at about a million miles per hour, and she had kicked off all of her sheets. She lay there for a moment, trying just to breathe and let the moment pass. She tried not to think of the silence, the cold eyes, the bloody hands. She tried to close her eyes, but it just made it worse. She sat up and picked her sheets up off of the ground, bunching them up. She held them against the pit in her stomach that was forming as she stared at the twin bed across from her. The full moon slanted across the empty sheets, the vacant wall behind it.

Soon she couldn’t take it anymore. She crossed to the other bed, dragging her sheets along after her. She fell against the bed, curling herself into the smallest ball she possibly could make. She pulled the sheets around her and cried herself to sleep.

 

The next day had Mabel and Soos cleaning out one of the many unused closets around the Shack. This one seemed to have a bunch of costumes and decorations in it (“From back in my theatre days,” Stan had said). Mabel, of course, spent more time trying on the gaudy hats and jewelry than actually cleaning, but Soos didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was encouraging her to try on as many as possible before they threw it all away.

“You should give this to Goodwill, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel called. He was hanging out in the living room, as per usual.

“What would they want with a bunch of cowboy hats and pants that have way too many tassels?” he yelled back.

“The world always needs more costumes!” Mabel shouted, flinging a hot pink feather boa around Soos’s neck. He laughed, throwing a small purse into a black trash bag. Mabel caught the glint of a silver chain peeking out from under a firefighter suit.

“Whoa, what’s this?” she said, pulling it out. Attached to the long chain was a gleaming silver locket. She opened it to discover a large green gem inside. “Hey, it’s my birthstone!” she said delightedly, pulling the chain over her head.

“That’s actually really nice,” Soos said. “Maybe Mr. Pines’ll let you keep it.”

“Hey, Grunkle Stan!” she yelled.

“Yeah!”

“Can I keep one of the things in here?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever floats your boat, kid!”

She packed the rest of the stuff in bags and carried it out to Soos’s car. She got a promise from him that he would take all of the stuff to Goodwill before he drove away. She palmed the locket, and thought of the journal she found the day before. She ran upstairs, took it, and went out into the forest.

She really had no idea where she was going, but just kept putting one foot in front of the other. The trees passed by around her, and various critters chittered from the dappled shadows.

She took the necklace off again to look at it. The front was covered in an elaborate engraving of a forest of pines, a river winding through them. _This is really beautiful for a costume piece_ , she thought. She flipped it over, surprised to find more engraving on the back.

“ _Reddantur deperditi_ …” she read.

_Whoa, it’s like some ancient secret language or something!_

She held her wrist up beside the lettering. She kept a sharpie by her bedside so she could draw her reminder when she woke up. She’d done this every morning since her parents had told her. They didn’t stop her, despite her mom’s fussing about the dangers of ink poisoning. They knew she had to do this.

“ _Reddantur deperditi_ ,” she said again, rolling the unfamiliar words around in her mouth. “ _Reddantur deperditi_ …”

She looked up and jumped. There was a boy standing by the tree in front of her. He looked to be about her age, wearing a blue shirt and navy shorts. His brown hair fell over his forehead, and his brown eyes seemed to catch more light than was physically possible. At first she thought he was a trick of the light, but the more she looked at him, the more she realized that this boy was real.

 _Hi_.

She gasped and drew back, dropping the pendant. She blinked, and the boy was gone.

“Hello?” she called into the forest, but nothing responded. She suddenly felt very alone. “Hellooooo?” she called again, and when nothing answered, she picked up the pendant again by its chain.

“What the hey-hey are you?” she muttered to the locket, opening it again. It only gleamed at her in response. She ran home into the gift shop, which was closed for the day. She hid behind the mummified mermaid aquarium and opened the journal.

“The Undead, Gnomes, Leprecorn…” She flipped through all of the pages, but no mention of a pine tree locket. _But it has to be magical, right? Or was that just coincidence?_ Or did she just imagine a boy in the woods? She palmed the locket again, then decided to make her first entry in the journal. She pulled a pen from the base of her braid and began to write.

“Pine Tree Locket: magical?” she wrote. “Additional entry by Mabel Pines. Found in an abandoned costume closet in the Mystery Shack. May have the ability to summon boys at will.” She crossed out that last part, thinking it sounded a little too ridiculous. She’d find a better way to phrase it. “May be able to summon mysterious disappearing people. I’m going to try again.”

“But how?” she asked herself. She had no idea how she did it the first time. Maybe rubbing it like a lamp? It seemed ridiculous, but she tried it. Nothing. She tried every way she could think of, thought back to every magical object in every Disney movie, but none of it was working. She sighed and went back to the journal.

“Nothing has been working,” she wrote, “Obviously real magic is different that fairytale magic, or I’d have this thing working much faster. Or I was just crazy. Who knows?” She doodled the locket next to the passage, then flipped the page.

“Hi there, journal. Mabel Pines here. Age: 12. Favorite animal: All of them, but especially pigs. Favorite color: Rainbow. Favorite Food: Pancakes. Favorite season: Summer! Favorite constellation: the Big Dipper.” Next to it she drew the mark she wore on her wrist every day. “I am currently spending the summer with my Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls, Oregon. My parents are Ariel and Hadron Pines. I’m an only child but—“ Mabel bit her lip. “I didn’t used to be.”


End file.
